Prologue

“T onight is a lovely, quiet evening.” Dr. Jonathon Wingford beamed, as he glanced around the emergency room. After thirty years of working here, he always thought of this as his home away from home. Still, this was Halloween, and he’d expected more craziness than this. But it was a small town, so maybe they would dodge that particular bullet tonight, although it was still young. “How odd for a Halloween night. No one’s here.”

“Sure, there is,” the orderly said, nodding toward the big emergency room door.

Jonathon turned to see a blood-covered woman standing on her own, with a shell-shocked look in her eyes.

Two nurses raced to her.

She held out her hands and then slowly, ever-so-slowly, like a cartoon, crumpled to her knees and then to the floor before the nurses could catch her. Jonathon raced to her side, checking for wounds. A moment later, puzzled, he sat back, frowning at his patient, then looked to his nurses and shook his head. “She doesn’t appear to have any open wounds. Let’s move her to a bed and do a full workup.”

They quickly laid her on a gurney and wheeled her into the next open cubicle. After transferring her to a bed, they did a full workup to see just what was going on.

The patient opened her eyes a few minutes later and stared up at him. She reached up a bloody hand, grabbed his lab coat, and whispered in a pained tone, “Help.”

He gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s all right. You’re in the hospital now. Take it easy. We’re trying to figure out what happened. You don’t appear to have any injuries, but you’re covered in blood.”

“Not my blood,” she whispered.

He knew that. He could see that. But where had the blood come from?

“My head hurts,” she murmured.

“Right. It does appear to have some bruising, but I don’t see any open wounds.”

“Inside,” she whispered. “My head’s pounding inside.”

“Where’s the blood from?” he asked, trying to keep the urgency out of his tone. “Tell me who’s injured.”

“Accident,” she whispered. “There was an accident. She’s been hurt.”

Jonathon frowned and asked the nurse, “Where did she come from? Do we have any idea what kind of accident? Was she alone? Have the local authorities been called?”

Behind him, the other nurse said, “I’ll go find out,” and she took off.

Jonathon looked down at the young woman. “What’s your name?”

“Daisy,” she whispered. “Daisy. Danica. Daisy. Where’s Danica?”

She kept repeating both names, so he tried asking again. “Is your name Daisy?”

She stared up at him. Her eyes grew wider and wider, and then a weird cry erupted from deep inside her throat, like a high-pitched whine. The unholy sound rattled his soul.

He tried to calm her down, and then, without warning, the sound shut off, and she collapsed back onto the bed, unconscious. He ordered a CT scan to see just what was going on with her head, plus an X-ray to confirm any internal injuries they might have missed. The swelling on her head was his main concern. But he needed to know how bad it was and if she had any other injuries he couldn’t see.

With her stabilized and barely conscious, he stepped back, as his patient was quickly wheeled out of the room. He looked over at a nurse standing there, a notepad in her hand, frowning.

“What did you find out?” he asked her.

“The sheriff said they received a call of an injured woman covered in blood, walking on the street. They found her. She was alone and barely coherent and was calling out for Danica. They called an ambulance for her, but she disappeared into the trees somehow, and they’ve been looking for her since. They have no idea how she got here.”

He looked toward the hospital bed, rolled down to the end of the hallway, waiting for the elevator. “Do they have a name for her? We didn’t find any ID on her.”

At that, a security guard came in through the emergency double doors and said, “I followed the blood.” He took a moment to shake his head. “There’s quite a trail all the way back out the parking lot and across the road, before disappearing into the trees.”

Jonathon had that thought running through his mind, as he added, “So she may have walked here on her own.” He stood there, staring down the hallway at the woman who’d now disappeared into the elevator. Something about her was familiar and yet distant. He couldn’t quite explain it. Her cry had been unnerving, but the fact that she was completely coated in someone else’s blood, with only a slight head wound? Well, that was an odd one for him. He glanced back over at the nurse to see her studying him oddly. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly. “When did you change your lab coat?”

“What do you mean?” He grabbed his coat by the front edges and gave it a shake. “I didn’t change my lab coat.”

She frowned, glanced at his lab coat again, and then dropped her gaze to the floor.

He looked at his lab coat and at the floor where she was staring and said, “I don’t get it. What’s wrong?”

“She grabbed your lab coat,” the nurse said quietly, her gaze darting to his face and then away. “Remember that bloody hand?”

“I know,” he bit off. “Of course I remember. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Your lab coat.… It’s clean. As if she never touched it.”

His eyebrows shot up, and he quickly took off the lab coat and checked it. He looked back at the nurse to see several other nurses and one of the orderlies walking toward him, all with the same look on their faces. “I didn’t change my lab coat,” he said in disbelief. “You saw me. I’ve been here the whole time.”

She nodded. “I know, and that’s the problem. It was bloody after she grabbed it. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow all that blood… disappeared. And honestly… there ain’t nothing good about that at all. Something spooky about that damn girl in the first place,” she said, shaking her head. “But right now, that lab coat is seriously… wrong .”

He laid his coat over the back of his chair, wondering just what was going on. Could they have been mistaken? Maybe the woman had only reached for him? No. He remembered the tug, as she’d grabbed on. He couldn’t imagine that none of that blood had transferred. More than a little unnerved, he headed back to write up notes on the case and quickly phoned Radiology to ensure all was well with her scans.

The head of the department, in a testy tone, said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t done any scans in the last hour.… More like two hours.”

“I sent a young woman up for a CT scan.”

He said, “Well, I haven’t seen her yet.” And hung up on him.

Jonathon went to Radiology himself to see the CT results firsthand. Yet, when he got up there, he found the place empty. He wandered around and then went in search of the one orderly he’d seen take the stretcher here.

When he finally met up with him, the guy nodded and said, “I took her there, then was called away. Why? Is something wrong?”

“Yes, according to Radiology, they haven’t seen her.” At that, Jonathon summoned security, and they did a sweep, clearing room by room, searching the small hospital. Thirty minutes later, when everybody reported back to Jonathon, he had to admit one truth that he was still struggling to realize: the woman was gone .

There was no trace of her. A bed was found in the hallway, but no blood was on the sheets. So, if this had been her bed, there was no easy way to prove it. But Jonathon couldn’t stop staring at the clean sheets, remembering his lab coat…

The same nurse who had commented on his lab coat spoke up in an eerie tone. “I tell you, that girl’s nothing but trouble. I don’t know who she is, where she came from, but the last thing we need is a ghost around this place.”

Startled, he turned and looked at her, and she nodded.

“I’ve been here since time began, almost as long as you, and it’s because of incidents like this that I rarely work Halloween night. Something like this has happened before. Almost exactly like this.”

Jonathon shook his head. “I’ve heard the rumors, but honestly I hate everything to do with Halloween, so generally take my holidays around this time. But yes, I’ve heard talk.”

“It started quite a few years ago,” she admitted in a low voice. “I would have to look up just how long ago. We had the same case of a young woman coming in, completely bloodstained, and she disappeared from the hospital. She had no visible wounds, also was covered in blood. She was sent for all the same tests, but she disappeared, and nobody ever saw her again.”

At that, several of the other staff members spoke up.

“I heard about that.”

“Yeah, I did too.”

“Do you really think that’s the same person? Or ghost rather?”

At the word ghost , silence fell around Jonathon, as the staff all turned toward him, as if they expected him to have answers.

He was still wrapping his head around the fact that they were missing a patient. “I don’t know what is going on now,” Jonathon said, his hands on his hips, “but I know I was treating a flesh-and-blood woman.”

“Sure,” the nurse said, looking at him pointedly. “A flesh-and-blood woman who didn’t leave any bloodstains on your lab coat.”

The other nurse looked at him and whispered, “So what the hell does that mean?”

Jonathon had no answers. Who could? All he knew was that the young injured woman had asked for his help, and, before he could do much, she’d disappeared.

But to where?